OFFERING A PREVIEW – School Committee chairman Patrick Murphy offers a comment regarding the proposed FY’12 budget during the District Leadership Council meeting held prior to the School Committee meeting Feb. 8.

FY’12 budget ‘level service with a twist’

In seeking what she called “level service with a twist,” Supt. Dr. Patricia Grenier presented a $62 million budget for FY 2012 to the school committee Feb. 8.

Grenier said the budget for the fiscal year starting in July 2011 aims to provide the same level of service the district is operating at now, while seeking to maintain several components of the FY’11 budget previously funded by the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

The superintendent noted that the requested budget amount is an increase of 2.99 percent from FY’11.

Grenier said that keeping the ARRA-funded positions is part of the twist.

“The twist is our creation of a few positions with ARRA funding,” Grenier said.

ARRA was federal funding received by all school systems in the state for two years. The funds will be exhausted at the end of the this school year in June.

Grenier said that while much of the district’s ARRA funds were used for one-time costs, the district does have several positions that were created using ARRA funds that Grenier would like to maintain.

“We have some positions that are critical to us that were funded under ARRA that I’m proposing remain funded during this budget presentation,” Grenier said.

Those positions are full-day kindergarten assistants at Hyannis West Elementary School, adjustment and prevention support at Barnstable Intermediate School, and district-wide special education facilitation at the elementary level.

Grenier stressed the need for the continued use of kindergarten assistants at Hyannis West Elementary.

“We discovered within the first two weeks of school last year that we have an entire classroom of kindergarteners at Hyannis West that had not received any preschool intervention,” Grenier said. “That is a huge anomaly. We need the kindergarten assistants for that population of students.”

Grenier also said that the adjustment and prevention support at BIS has contributed significantly to a more positive atmosphere in the school, and that the increasing number of students with special needs warranted the continuance of special ed facilitation.

In order to balance the budget, and take into consideration any potential shortfalls, Grenier said that the district would be relying on approximately $700,000 from school choice revenue (derived from attendance by students from other towns), $1.3 million from Circuit Breaker funds (a state lifeline intended for schools), and $200,000 from the district’s transportation fees, as well as funds from the Education Jobs Fund and from a reduction in Barnstable’s out-of-district tuition payments.

Potential impacts to the FY’12 budget include utilities, various contractual agreements, and rising health care costs.

As was the case with the FY’10 and ’11 budgets, Grenier is refraining from dipping into the district’s savings account, getting away from what she felt was a heavy reliance upon the funds.

Whether the district will be able to continue that practice into FY’13 and beyond was unclear, though Grenier acknowledged in response to questions that looking ahead to FY’13 was part of budget discussions with Mark Milne, the Town’s director of finance, and Gareth Markwell, deputy finance director.

Because Grenier will retire at the end of the 2010-2011 school year, she stressed that it is her hope to establish a pattern of financial stability in the district for her successor.

Committee chairman Patrick Murphy said that given the district’s continued enrollment decline he would like to see at least 10 fewer full-time positions in the district through attrition or retirements.

“That would make me feel like we’re mitigating some of the risk of using school choice money this year versus banking it or not using as much of it,” he said.

Committee member Fran McDonald requested that the superintendent look into formulating a policy regarding one-time funds use versus savings.

“If we can craft a reasonable policy about balancing the desire to hoard money and sock it away for a rainy day and cut positions today or spend it all like drunken sailors,” he said. “We may find out in a couple years that our policy was a little off and we may have to tweak it, but I think the work spent doing that would serve us well moving forward.”

McDonald also asked for a deeper look into the district’s various fees such as transportation and athletics and their actual use as a means of determining whether they might help balance the budget.

“For the current fees in place, what are the true costs of those programs?” McDonald said. “I think it would be valuable information to know the cost of the programs we’re running and to know the share of that costs the participating families are coming up with.”

McDonald also urged the committee to look at the potential for adding fees where there are none in order to benefit the district in the future.

Murphy praised Grenier, Markwell, and Milne’s work on the budget, particularly in keeping it reasonable.

“I was very impressed,” he said. “The 2.99 percent increase was a nice surprise to me. I was concerned that there was going to be double-whammy impact of raises…and health care increases.”

“Given the restraint that we have, and the constraints that we have, I think this is a fair budget proposal,” Grenier said. “It allows the committee to have both a defensible presentation to the Town Council and to the community, but also maintains some resources for Fiscal ’13.”

The school committee will hold another budget meeting Feb. 22 at 7 p.m. at the Town Hall in Hyannis.